Pace Environmental Notes, the weblog of the Pace University School of Law’s Environmental Collection, is a gateway to news, recent books and articles, information resources, and legal research strategies relevant to the fields of environmental, energy, land use, animal law and other related disciplines.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

This Report (DOE/NETL-2009/1358) dated May 8, 2009 by the Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory examines the potential for CO2 storage under federal lands. The reports finds that the storage resource beneath Federal lands ranges between 126 and 375 billion metric tons. The vast majority of Federal lands are west of the Mississippi. Of the estimated storage potential beneath Federal land in the United States, 68 percent can be found in the stratigraphy of Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas.

The single most important challenge to utilizing Federal lands for storage of captured CO2 is regulatory. Experience from oil and gas operations provides an important guide and basis for development of regulations and procedures for CO2 storage operations. A regulatory framework will help to define expectations for the operator, regulator, and insurer. The EPA and the states of Washington and Wyoming have provided an important yet only initial effort in the regulatory arena.